Since 2010, Matt Rockman and I have coordinated an Evolution Book Club at NYU for students, faculty, and scholars interested in evolutionary biology. This group has met on and off over the years and had various incarnations and benefited greatly from colleagues who have taken the lead in making it happen. Below is the list (in approximate reverse chronological order) of books that we have read so far.
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London :John Murray, 1859.
Fisher, R.A. (1930) The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
LHaldane, J. B. S. (1932). The causes of evolution. Macmillan.
Lynch, Michael: The Origins of Genome Architecture. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2007.
Schrödinger, Erwin (1974). What is life? & mind and matter: the physical aspect of the living cell. Cambridge University Press.
Kirschner, Marc. and John Gerhart. The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2005.
Gould, Stephen Jay. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002.
Monod, Jacques (1971). Chance and necessity. New York,: Vintage Books.
Losos, Jonathan B. Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution. New York, Riverhead Books, 2017.
Roughgarden Joan. The Genial Gene. Deconstructing. Darwinian Selfishness. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California. Press, 2009.
Wagner, A. (2014) The Arrival of the Fittest: How Nature Innovates. Penguin Random House.
Okasha, Samir (2006). Evolution and the levels of selection. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ohno, S. (1970). Evolution by gene duplication. Springer-Verlag
Jacob, Francois, The possible and the actual. University of Washington Press Seattle 1982
Shubin, Neil. Your Inner Fish : a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. Pantheon Books, 2008.
Nüsslein-Volhard, Christiane 2019. “Beauty”, Animal Beauty: On the Evolution of Biological Aesthetics. MIT Press
Kenneally, Christine. The Invisible History of the Human Race : How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures. Penguin Books, 2015.
Nei, M. (2013). Mutation-driven evolution. Oxford University Press.
Lewontin, Richard C. (1991). Biology as ideology: the doctrine of DNA. HarperPerennial.
Ågren, J. Arvid, The Gene’s-Eye View of Evolution. Oxford University Press. 2021